Friday, June 25, 2010

here she is! she? boy? i dunno. can't decide yet. i just picked it up this morning and it's a beaut. smells good, too! i even went to the post office and the bank. i'm like a grown up. know what's great about having a car? i can go anywhere i want. anywhere in the world! unless you have to cross the water in which case i have a problem because unfortunately, despite my efforts, i couldn't find myself a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. but! besides that, i can go anywhere! i have so many options, i just don't even know where to start! i'm thinking the beach would be a good option, though. yes, the beach. that'll do.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

I went to Fenway Pahk! It was wicked! Really... i LOVED it. I even had a Fenway Frank and wore a Red Sox shirt. I guess you could say I'm a true fan now. It was a beautiful day and the Red Sox won. Overall, it was a great time. I don't really have much to say about it so i'll just post the pictures :)

Ben: I thought of you the whole time and wished you were there with me. You would've loved it! Love you, bud. Work hard and maybe you could play here some day ;)

Robert came to town. He's Reed's nephew and he's eleven. At first, i thought this would be great. Someone to hang out with would be a lot of fun. I'll repeat that he's eleven. Not so fun. So, I've been dying this whole time to get out and go to this great little park down the street that has a giant slip 'n slide. But, going by myself would be a little weird and i don't have any friends so i invited Robert to go with me. We picked the hottest day of the week and got our swimming suits on and headed over. After we waited 20 minutes for them to set it up, we trekked up the hill and hopped on our tubes. After all of this, we got to the top of the hill and discovered that the slide wasn't a waterslide at all. It was just hard plastic that you slide down, sort of quickly, and then you have to hike up the hill to go again. It might not have been so bad except it was really REALLY hot and humid that day. Plus, Robert has eaten nothing but sugar since he got here so he was done after about three times down the hill. Well, the good part of the day was that they sold homemade ice cream there so we each got a cone (I had cookie dough mmm :)) and i got to get out of the house for a little bit.

Besides that excursion, we've done a couple other things with Robert. We went to this weird furniture store where there are fake people who sing. We bought three fish for Reed's fish tank and Robert named all of them. He named the clown fish Bob and Melanie. Bob is a girl and Melanie is a boy. We saw Karate Kid. We watched EVERY SINGLE finals basketball game. Mostly, we've played a lot of card games. They play Nertz so i was excited for some competition but they didn't even know what hit 'em when i started playing ;). Robert likes to tell A LOT of weird eleven year old potty jokes and fart in my face a.k.a. the not fun part. He also likes to follow me around and sing "Haley and Derek sitting in a tree K I S S I N G". It was funny for... hm maybe two seconds but now i'm annoyed. But, i'm doing my best to be patient. I still have almost three more weeks with him.. yippee!

Thursday, June 3, 2010

We made a trip to Vermont yesterday to see the Ben and Jerry's original factory. It's a pretty cool place to go because the tour is short and sweet... haha punny. But really, you just go through a short thing and then you get lots of ice cream. We had a really good time and it was actually really interesting. We didn't get to meet Ben and Jerry cause they're off somewhere rollin' in the dough, I was kinda bummed about that. But I do thank them for the love handles on my body thanks to their most delicious creation.

Ben and Jerry went on some little tour thing and gave out ice cream from a van like this one. This isn't the actual one because while they were serving ice cream it spontaneously combusted and no longer exists but it looked something like this.

Since we were already in Vermont we decided to stop in at the birthplace of Joseph Smith. The missionaries there were really great and helped us get Reed to all of the different locations at the visitors center. They were very knowledgeable and I learned a lot. In the visitors center they had the original hearth and doorstep from the home. They also had a cool display of sculptures that has been on tour for about a year. I saw them when I was in Kirtland a year ago so it was cool to get to see them again. It was a really neat day and I've come to the conclusion that Vermont is basically made of trees

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Apparently in Boston you can make up your own sport and so, we have Candlepin Bowling. It's this really great game that is super easy to cheat at. It's just like bowling but you get the throw the ball three times but they don't clean up the pins in between throws. If you're playing with people who tend to get distracted by other things, you can quickly get in a couple extra throws and hope that you knock down a couple more. Then, you keep score on your own piece of paper so no one really knows what you write down and it's really just a great time. Even with all of my cheating, I still managed to lose the game. It's really not as easy as it looks but it is a lot of fun!

Well, I came home from school and I decided to quit my job at the campus mail in hopes that I would find a job closer to my house but that plan epically failed. I applied at a couple of places and then just hung out with my mom waiting to hear back about those jobs. Then, one magical day one of my neighbors told me about a job opportunity in Boston to help out her brother, Reed, who is paralyzed from the neck down. So, instead of staying close to home, I hopped on a plane and moved to Massachusetts for a year. I live in Reed's house with him and his parents. His brother and sister-in-law have been here for the past year and a half and are training me for a couple of days until they move back to Provo. I've only been here a couple of days but it has been really fun so far. I've been to four states since I got here and I've been able to see some cool things. Reed has been really patient and gracious as I've been learning his care and I'm really grateful for the opportunity I've been given to try something new.

This is my new home and it's beautiful. All the houses here are pretty incredible and the trees never end. Right behind the house is what looks like miles of trees.

We went to a little tourist town called Rockport. It's right on the coast and they have hundreds of cute little shops. The weather was perfect and we spent the entire day eating treats. Beautiful. We bought a whole box of fudge, ate pie and ice cream and hot chocolate for dinner, bought another box of salt water taffies and for lunch I had a raspberry ice cream cone dipped in "jimmies". It was wicked awesome. And I don't know why this is blue...

This was just at the end of one of the roads with all the shops so Kent, Kayla and I ran out to the end and put our feet in the water. It was really quite neaky, an adjective that has a meaning only a few would know. Right on the other side of the rock wall are probably 50 lobster cages and there are several little restaurants that serve lobster straight from the ocean. We ate pie instead.

I saw a bunch of other people taking pictures in front of this red house so I figured it must be important but I have no clue what it is. Looks cool, though! It was a wonderful day in Rockport.